URAP

Folklore Archivist - Archivist, Folklore Program

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

The Folklore Archive is seeking a detail-oriented student to help digitize archival materials. This role provides a hands-on opportunity to engage with archival processes and contribute to the preservation and dissemination of rich cultural materials from the Berkeley Folklore Archive. No prior experience in archival work or digitization...

Stephen Best - Professor, Townsend Center

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

The Undergraduate Humanities Writer covers humanities-related events and programs at Berkeley's Townsend Center for the Humanities and across campus...

Marianne Constable - Professor, Rhetoric

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Short book-length manuscript on rhetorical issues in dialogic philosophical texts from Plato to Heidegger (based on upper-division course I have taught several times...

Raul Coronado - Professor, Ethnic Studies

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

How can we write a history of Latine feelings? How can private writing give us access to how Mexicans in the Southwest thought about their feelings, their interiority, their sense of self? Knowing more about this can give us a better sense of two things: how have Latine communities expressed...

Brian DeLay - Professor, History

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

None of the revolutionaries who transformed the Americas in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries could mass-produce their own guns and ammunition. They had to rely on the international arms trade. Aim at Empire is the first book to explore how access to weapons (or lack thereof) shaped...

Jeroen Dewulf - Professor, Dutch Studies

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

My research focuses on the history of the transatlantic slave trade, for which I collect archival materials from/about Africa and the Americas. I am requesting assistance from one or several URAP students for the transcription of some archival documents...

Paul Fine - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

High in the rainforest canopy, epiphytic plants face the challenge of obtaining the nutrients they need without having contact with the soil. This project investigates nutrient acquisition challenges and strategies between epiphytic plants found in two different forest types in the Peruvian Amazon: relatively nutrient-rich forests with a clay...

Mia Fuller - Professor, Institute of European Studies

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

This is the ideal URAP for students interested in a career in international diplomacy and/or foreign affairs. The Institute of European Studies seeks to enrich America's understanding of Europe -- its people, culture, languages, and politics -- through the generation and dissemination of distinguished scholarship. As the University's focal point for...

Andrew Garrett - Professor, Linguistics

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

Participants will help transform archival field recordings into resources used for linguistic research and language revitalization...

Deniz Göktürk - Professor, German

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

The German department's open access electronic journal Transit is turning 20. A conference to celebrate this occasion is being planned for April 2026. The journal has been a pioneering platform for multimedia publishing, and we are continuously exploring new forms of presentation. The student will learn to think critically about...

Darcy Gimaldo Grigsby - Professor, Art History

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: Off Campus

HANDCOLOR is a meditation on the strange tenderness of handcolored photographs. Although I consider professional studio work, I focus on amateur practice of painting directly onto black and white photographs from the 1860s to 1950s. HANDCOLOR is now in preparation for publication in Spring 2027 by the George Eastman Museum...

Timothy Hampton - Professor, Comparative Literature

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

Research developing a bibliography and approach to the history of American protest songs, from the Revolutionary War to the present...

Andrew Leong - Professor , English

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Japanese and English-language literary columns in Japanese American newspapers played crucial roles in pre-World War II immigrant society, offering opportunities for readers and contributors to reflect upon their lives in the United States. This project includes retrieving, categorizing, and studying literary texts through resources such as the Hoji...

Andrew Leong - Professor , English

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Tessaku_ Tessaku (鉄柵, or “Iron Fence”) is a Japanese-language literary journal that was published by incarcerees in the Tule Lake Segregation Center during World War II. It consists of nine issues, totaling 751 pages, running from March 1944 to July 1945, and includes poetry, fiction, and essays composed by...

Xiaobo Lü - Professor, Political Science

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

How do political parties and rebel groups strengthen their organizations while simultaneously waging violent struggles against external rivals? This project investigates this question by examining the formative period of party building within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1927 to 1945. Founded in 1921, the CCP soon became embroiled in...

Rita Lucarelli - Professor, MELC (Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures)

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

Ancient Egyptian coffins are inscribed with spells and images which stand in for spells. All function together as a machine to resurrect the deceased and to guide them safely through the next world. Given this function, it is perhaps surprising that the texts from coffins are usually published completely divorced...

Donald J. Mastronarde - Professor, Classics

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: Off Campus

This project involves research for a new and more complete edition of the scholia to Euripides. Scholia are annotations written in the margins and between the lines of medieval manuscripts of classical authors. In the scholia we find filtered through many generations of reuse parts of ancient scholarly discussions of...

Rahul Parson - Professor , South and Southeast Asian Studies

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

The initiation of a liberalized economy and rise of right-wing nationalist politics has increased the precarity of vulnerable communities, minorities, women, and those seen as outsiders or immigrants. This project uses historical, archival, ethnographic, and literary critical approaches to vernacular cultures in order to make visible the new political...

J. Theodore (Ted) Peña - Professor, Ancient Greek and Roman Studies

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

This project is concerned with the classification, quanitification, analysis and publication of the ca. 20 tons of ancient Roman pottery recovered in the Palatine East Excavations in downtown Rome. The material, which dates to the period ca. AD 50 – AD 450, comes from all over the Mediterranean world, and provides...

Christine Philliou - Professor, History

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

This is a collaborative research and Digital Humanities project I initiated in 2020 and our team includes scholars in Greece, Turkey, and several other countries. We are reading Ottoman Turkish and Greek sources about the population of Greek Orthodox in Istanbul and creating data sets, and then visualizations and interactive...

Marjorie Shapiro - Professor, Physics

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most powerful particle accelerator ever built and researchers use its data to study what the universe was like shortly after the big bang. Researchers at Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) play a key role in all aspects of the ATLAS...

Marjorie Shapiro - Professor, Physics

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

LBNL researchers developed a novel method to restore early sound recordings using methods from precision optical metrology and data analysis (see: irene.lbl.gov). These methods have been applied to a number of important historical collections of early recorded sound. Over the past two years a project at the Smithsonian Institution in...

Nicole Starosielski - Professor, Film Studies

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: Off Campus

Every satellite image, command signals to control a spacecraft or probe, and all the resulting science dataset from space missions are made possible by a largely invisible layer of ground-based digital infrastructure—complex systems that enable the transmission, storage, and processing of high-volume data across facilities distributed across...

Timothy Tangherlini - Professor, Scandinavian

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

The Icelandic Family Sagas are an intriguing window onto the social world of 10th and 11th century Iceland, seen through the authorial lens of late medieval writers. A striking characteristic of the sagas is the abundance of characters that interact in and across complex social networks as they first initiate...

Timothy Tangherlini - Professor, Scandinavian

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

The Berkeley folklore archive is one of the largest, student-created folklore archives in North America. Started in the 1960s, the archive houses over 500,000 records detailing the everyday life and informal culture of thousands of students and their communities. In 2020, the archive began digitizing these records. Along with...

Sophie Volpp - Professor, Comparative Literature

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

I am engaged in two projects. One concerns attempts to preserve China's cultural heritage by saving rare books from capture by the Japanese army during the Sino-Japanese war. Since English-language sources are somewhat limited, reading knowledge of Chinese or Japanese is a big plus. The undergraduate students work...